


Strong at the Broken Places

by bispaceprincess



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Army Mechanic Raven, Emotional Baggage, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Physiotherapist Octavia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-09-22
Packaged: 2018-04-12 11:52:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4478330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bispaceprincess/pseuds/bispaceprincess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Octavia gets a call from across the world telling her that the woman she could be in love with has been shot. When Raven comes back to heal, she doesn't want help, but she gets it anyways.</p><p>A/n: This fic is discontinued</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a prompt I got on tumblr like a million years ago: Really angsty octaven prompt: raven is a cop and gets shot trying to save this little girl and octavia only hears about it after the surgery... maybe future into like broody raven loosing her shit over physio and octavia being all loving
> 
> Obviously changed up a bit. Hope you like it!

Octavia was jerked out of sleep by the phone ringing beside her head. She had always been able to sleep through anything before; it had been a constant source of annoyance for Bellamy who had been charged with getting her up on time during high school. That all changed when Bellamy deployed to South Sudan as part of the UN's peacekeeping force there. Now she jumped every time her phone rang, no matter how little sleep she had got the night before (she really needed to stop agreeing to go out with Indra after Krav Maga practice, now she was sore and hungover.) Even though it was just a peacekeeping mission, it was still active duty, she had a right to be worried.

 

"Hello?" she answered after she finally located her phone, not recognizing the number on the caller id.  
"Octavia?" Her brother responded tearily.  
The sound of her normally stoic brother in tears set a jolt of fear through her.  
"Bellamy? Oh my god, what happened? Are you okay?"  
"I'm fine, well mostly, it's my friend, Raven. You remember her, right?"  
  
Octavia felt her stomach plummet at his words. She definitely remembered Raven.

Raven had tagged along with Bellamy when he came home from base for Christmas last year because she had no family and her brother was practically a mother hen. The two had hit it off immediately. There was something about her acerbic wit and mischievous smile that drew Octavia in and then it was the kindness that lay close to her bones that kept her there. She had only visited for 2 weeks, but no one had ever made Octavia feel that way before or since.

It wasn't like she had kept it from Bellamy. He hadn't noticed because he had spent the entire break sneaking out whenever he could to spend time with his secret girlfriend (well he thought she was secret but come on, Octavia was not that gullible or stupid). In any case it left Raven and Octavia a lot of time during those two weeks to get to know one another. They had spent every day that Raven had visited staying up late, talking about everything under the sun. They found out that they both had complicated relationships with their mothers and non-existent ones with their fathers. They had both known what it was like to grow up in poverty, how it changed how you viewed the world even if you were no longer poor.

The night before she had to leave back for the base Bellamy had disappeared yet again, mumbling something about meeting up with Miller when Octavia knew for a fact that he hadn't made it home this year due to him spending the holidays with his new boyfriends family. He was seriously pathetic. Raven and her had proceeded to share a bottle of exorbitantly expensive bourbon that one of her clients had given to her as a thank you/Christmas present. Having to deal with men old enough to need hip replacements trying to pinch her ass all the time was a pain, but being a physical therapist did have some perks.

The long gazes and increasingly frequent touches they had shared over the past week finally came to a head with a helping push from alcohol. An overly dramatized argument about who was the best Disney princess (Octavia said Mulan whereas Raven had argued that Audrey from Atlantis was the best. Which okay, she could see, but she still wasn’t actually a princess) led to a tipsy play brawl and Octavia found herself straddling Raven in the middle of her living room breathing heavily.

Her hair hung like a curtain around their faces and suddenly the light atmosphere disappeared, replaced with tension draped over them like a heavy blanket. Everything seemed to freeze still and Octavia's eyes darted down when she saw Ravens tongue dart out for a second to wet her lips unconsciously. Suddenly everything came back and before she could stop herself or move away, she found herself bringing her lips to Ravens in a gentle, tentative kiss. She could feel her stomach start to clench during the second it took Raven to respond but suddenly she was kissing her back. She tasted like the warm vanilla of the bourbon and her lips were impossibly soft and Octavia let out a small moan which parted her lips allowing Raven to slip her tongue to caress hers. She brought a hand up to sweep her hair over to one side and then dropped it to caress the side of Raven's neck and cup her jaw as she slowly deepened the kiss. When Ravens hands stopped themselves just before they went to remove her shirt and instead pushed Octavia up and off of her she started to apologize. She was cut off by Raven's mouth descending on hers again as she pulled the two of them towards Octavias bedroom. Somehow on the way to the room they had both lost their clothing so when she pushed Octavia onto the bed there was no barrier to her assured caresses and when she dropped herself down between Octavia's legs she just gave herself over to the wave of new feelings without a thought.

After, they lay with their legs tangled together on Octavia's bed.

“That was...Wow,” Octavia breathed out.

She was met with silence. She rolled over and propped her head on one hand and looked at Raven. She was staring stonily at the ceiling above with a slight frown on her face.

“Hey, are you okay?” Octavia asked softly, trying to keep the dropping feeling in her stomach from being shown in her voice.

Raven didn’t answer, instead she shook her head sharply before bolting upright and quickly locating her clothes. Her entire body was taut with tension, Octavia could see the wiry muscles of her back as she jerkily pulled her bra on.

“Raven, what’s the matter?” She tried again.

“This was a mistake,” Raven replied in a monotone voice, still facing away from the bed.

“Oh,” Octavia breathed out, her stomach now in free fall.

For a second she swore she saw Ravens hand tighten into a fist, but she released it before she turned and replied in a harsher tone, “Did you think this meant something? Using my CO’s baby sister for meaningless sex is a new level of bad decision making on my part.”

Octavia's stomach now felt like it was somewhere around her toes. She could feel the tears pricking in the corners of her eyes but bit the inside of her cheek to keep them from falling. “It wasn’t meaningless to me…”

“Yeah, well, maybe you should learn to tell the difference between feelings and good sex.”

Octavia's mouth dropped open, this wasn’t like the Raven she had come to know over the past two weeks, but before she could reply Raven continued, “Listen, you’re young. You don’t have much experience with this stuff.”

“I just felt like maybe this was the start of something...”

“We can’t start anything now. I’m leaving in a month, I’m going to be gone for a year at least. You don’t want to start anything with me. Believe me.”

“In case you missed it, you don’t get to tell me how I feel.” Octavia bit back, having slightly recovered from the whiplash from the sudden change in atmosphere. Something about her tone caused the tension to leak out of Raven, her face fell and her tone went from angry to defeated.

“Look, okay? Last time I deployed I was engaged. We had been together practically forever, he was the reason I made it out of my childhood alive. When I was finished I wanted to surprise him and came back a couple days early and found him in bed with someone else. He had told her that we’d broken up, it wasn’t her fault but it fucking destroyed me. The entire time I was there I thought about him all the time. He was my tether back to my real life, I was seeing such awful things all the time and I would think about him and the life we were going to have when I was finished and he was my hope, my reason to keep going. Then he did what he did and I lost everything. He was the only real family I had ever known and then it was gone. I was planning on leaving the forces then, I had fulfilled my half of the agreement for the tuition payment, I was going to be a civilian. But without him it seemed so pointless so I reenlisted and now here I am. I just can’t go through that again.”

“I would never do anything like that to you.”

“You don’t know that,” she said, face shuttering again. “You don’t know how lonely it can get when you’ve been left behind.”

“People don’t have to physically go away for them to leave you behind,” Octavia said bitterly.

“You know that’s not what I meant…”

“I know,” she whispered, still looking away. “I’ve just never felt like I feel when I’m around you before. Maybe you’re right, maybe this was a mistake, but the way I feel… that’s not a mistake okay? I’m not going to try and convince you to be with me, I know you’re hurting and you have things that you need to work on before you can do that, but please just don’t shut me out when you’re doing it? You don’t have to try and make me hate you to stop whatever this could’ve been, okay?”

A long shuddering breath finally made Octavia turn back to Raven.

“Okay,” whispered Raven, almost so quiet she didn’t hear it. Then she hesitantly walked over to the bed and asked meekly, “Can I?”

“Yeah,” Octavia replied lifting the covers for them both the crawl under before bringing Raven into a hug with her head resting on her shoulder, “Friends, okay? No pressure.”

She let her fall asleep there with her fingers carding through her dark locks, thoughts swirling through her mind, after an hour she shook her awake and led her over to the guest room she had been staying in, before going back to her own bedroom and staring at the ceiling.

 

Octavia heard Bellamy sneak in around 5 in the morning (seriously not as secretive as he thought he was). Well maybe he would’ve been able to get away with it if she hadn’t been lying awake replaying the evening in her mind. Soon after she finally drifted to sleep only to be woken early the next day by Bellamy. The two of them had to report back before 5 and it was a long drive, so they needed to head out early. Octavia had shared a quick hug with both of them, and if she had lingered a bit longer with Raven who could blame her. She made them both promise to write her as much as they could before they headed out and only went back into the house when they turned the corner and she could no longer see them.She walked dazedly into her room, she felt like something humongous had shifted and she was completely out of control.

 

That was kind of how she felt now.

 

“Octavia? Are you still there?”

“Uhm yeah yeah, what happened?”

“We were out getting some supplies for a project and saw this little girl being attacked by a gang of boys and she raced in to help before I could stop her, I mean she’s a fucking army mechanic, not a soldier but she never listens,” he explains, oscillating between devastation and anger now.

“There was a group of Machar supporters in the neighborhood, we knew about them but we’re not allowed to engage until they do. It all happened so fast. One minute she was kicking those guys asses, then they’re coming around the corner, armed to the teeth. She got shot, and she’s been in surgery all night and they told me that she was going to live but she might never walk again.  I couldn’t do anything, O. I couldn’t stop it,” he let out an anguished sob and Octavia gripped the sheets tightly as she bit down on her lip to stop her own tears but she needed to keep it together for Bellamy, he always hid his pain from her, under the stupid notion that he had to take care of her and not the other way around.

“Hey Bell, Bell? It’s okay, she’s going to be okay. It’s not your fault. I’m sure you did everything you could, and you’re going to be there for her now, right? ”

“They’re sending her back, she’s not staying here. She doesn’t have any family O. She’s going to be all alone.”

“She won’t be alone,” Octavia whispered, almost to herself. 

“What?”

“I said, she won’t be by herself,” Octavia repeated, then the swirling feeling of panic subsided as she made her decision. “Tell me where she’s going to be, I’m going to her.”

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Octavia hesitated outside the door, for the first time. As soon as Bellamy had told her where Raven was going to be transported to she had been a flurry of motion. She had googled where the military hospital was located (thankfully only an hour drive away), discovered she had a friend from school who lived only 10 mins away and contacted them to see if it would be okay to crash for the first few nights, let her boss know that she had to take at least a week off because of a family emergency and researched everything she could about recovery from partial paralysis and gunshot wounds. But now? The reality of seeing Raven again for the first time in almost 6 months (because the combination of the shoddy connection and time difference had meant they had skyped a few times but it didn’t really count), and under these circumstances, was terrifying her.

She took a deep breath and rounded the corner into the room. Raven lay on the bed, looking away from the door. She could barely recognize her, beneath her deep tan she had a pallor, and she was so still. When Raven had visited at christmas she was always a whirlwind of energy. She was always dashing from place to place, hand never still, finding small appliances to take apart, examine and put back together so they ran better than they ever had. Even when she had slept, she tossed and turned, always nuzzling against Octavia and finding endless permutations for how their bodies could fit together.

Octavia observed her quietly, if Raven had noticed she was here she didn’t give any indication. Her chest rose with her breath in a not completely even rhythm, which meant she wasn’t asleep.  
  


“Hey,” She finally managed to stutter out.

There was no response. Maybe she was asleep. She came further into the room and tried again, “Hey, Raven.”

“Go away,” Raven replied dully.

What was she supposed to do with that? “It’s, um, it’s Octavia.”

Still refusing to look towards her, Raven repeated in the same monotone voice, “I know, go away.”

Octavia stepped further into the room, rounding the bed, to come into Ravens view, “I’m not going to do that.”

That seemed to jog something in Raven, but not really in a good way. Fire came back into her eyes and she glared right at Octavia as she said, “Listen, I don’t fucking want you here. It’s bad enough that some rebel dictators asshole minion shot me in the fucking back and now I might never walk again, I don’t need to deal with your fucking pity. So do me a favor and leave me the fuck alone.”

Octavia tamped down the anger and frustration she felt at Ravens words, knowing that they wouldn’t resolve anything. Lessons hard won from a scrappy childhood, where she had been relentlessly bullied for being poor and for having a drug addict for a mother and an overbearing brother for a parent. Years of getting into pointless fights, with anyone she could, before she found discipline in martial arts, and under her mentor Indra.   
“No, you listen to me, I don’t pity you. I care about you, I want to help you because you are important to me and I hate that someone did this to you, but I know, I know, that you can get through this without me, but you don’t have to.”

For a moment Raven lay there with a stunned expression on her face. Octavia wanted to punch everyone in the world that had ever contributed to Ravens natural reaction to someone caring about her being surprise. Then the surprise, and the false bravado fell away and her face crumpled as her eyes became glassy.

“I’m scared,” Raven said in an wavering voice.

“That’s okay,” Octavia reassured her, coming to grasp one of her hands. “It’s okay, you’re going to be okay. I’m going to make sure of it.”

“I have another surgery later on today.”

“Okay, I’ll stay with you until you have to go. Then I’ll be here when you get back.”

“What if I don’t come back?”

“Well then I’ll pull an Orpheus and march down into the underworld and pull you back,” when Raven gave her a skeptical look she continued, “What!? I am Bellamy’s sister. You can’t expect me not to know that one!”

“Oh, that wasn’t the surprising part. I’m just trying to imagine if you’ve gotten any better at singing since that truly awful showing at karaoke when I visited. If not, I feel like you ‘pulling an orpheus’ will do me more harm than good.”

“You’re lucky you’re injured Raven, or I would have to beat you up for defaming my good name.”

“You could try.”

Octavia looked down to where her and Raven’s hands were tangled together and replied softly, “Yeah, I could try.”

She could see the exhaustion on Raven’s face, how her eyelids drooped slightly and how the skin was pulled ever so slightly too tight across her cheekbones, so she continued, “Hey, you should get some rest. I’ve heard getting surgery on your back is pretty tiring.”

“Well, as someone who’s had three in the past two weeks, I can confirm the rumors,” She replied wryly.

That sombered Octavia immediately, she had been trying to ignore how close it had been, but fuck it had been close. She could have lost her forever, and not in the tolerable way, that is if Raven had found someone else and been happy with them, which would have sucked but she would have survived. If Raven had died, and she had never been able to tell her or hell shown her how she felt. If she had never been able to make her know how completely lovable and loved she was, _that_ would have been intolerable. She promised herself that as soon as Raven was better she would tell her, she couldn’t right now, she was going through too much, but after. Even if it meant she lost her forever. 

She struggled to hide her racing emotions and place a calm smile on her face before replying, “Well you know better than anyone. Get some sleep Raven.”

“You’ll stay?”

“As long as you need.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I am the slowest ever at writing. It'll probably be a long time before the next update too, but I will have a new Octaven fic (one that's a little less angsty) coming out soon with the rare-pair fic challenge, so keep an eye out!

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hey to my on tumblr at klokkombikru


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